Naval Academy, other colleges differ on when an application counts The U.S. Naval Academy received 19,145 applications for the class that began in fall and accepted 1,426. Its admission rate was 7.5 percent, one percentage point lower than Princeton’s. Or was it? Academy leaders acknowledge that only 5,720 of those applications were complete. The rest, more than two-thirds of the total, were partial applications that never reached the university’s admissions board and were never seriously considered. (The Washington Post)

UC-Berkeley and other ‘public Ivies’ in fiscal peril Across the nation, a historic collapse in state funding for higher education threatens to diminish the stature of premier public universities and erode their mission as engines of upward social mobility. (The Washington Post)

Wanted: Technical Women Evidence continues to mount that capable women in technical fields have less confidence than men that they will be successful. Women engineering students perform as well as men, but are more likely than men to switch to a different major. These women switch because they don’t believe that their skills are good enough and they don’t feel like they “fit” in engineering. (U.S. News & World Report)

College Football Coach Salary Envy While we bemoan the salaries and gains of Wall Street and TARP funded business, there is another category of serious curiosity; the dramatic increase in salaries of football coaches at public institutions. (The Huffington Post)

About the blogger

Alex Friedrich reports on higher education issues for MPR News. Among the stories he has covered: the fall of the Berlin Wall, aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, 2003 Moscow suicide bombing and 2004 presidential elections in the Republic of Georgia. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Georgia and a master’s in European political economy from the London School of Economics.